Author Description

A long-awaited addition to the botany titles in the highly-regarded Collins New Naturalist series, this book covers mosses and liverworts, a group of about 24,000 fairly low-growing plants. This authoritative guide explains their ecological importance, how they can act as environmental indicators and their general biology. With full-colour illustrations throughout, it covers distribution patterns and dispersal mechanisms, their relation with climate, historical uses for mosses, and habitats. This is a branch of botany which has always relied heavily on amateur involvement, and the authors explain what amateurs can do today to increase our knowledge about these essential plants.